Hazel (Frieda) Larsen Archer

When Hazel Larsen Archer arrived at Black Mountain College to study photography in 1944, the experimental liberal arts college was host to many gifted avant-garde artists: Willem and Elaine de Kooning, musician John Cage, dancer Merce Cunningham, architect Buckminster Fuller, and photographer Barbara Morgan.

Having contracted polio at the age of 10, Hazel conducted her photography from her wheelchair; her landscape and portrait photography was all taken from a seated position. Under the influence of her Bauhaus teacher Josef Albers, she developed a powerful visual aesthetic, working in black and white with natural light.

She stayed at the college for nine years, becoming its first full-time teacher of photography in 1949. Her photographs provide an invaluable record of the influential school. Her 1948 motion study photographs of Merce Cunningham improvising outdoors, Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, and students Ruth Asawa and Susan Weil became some of her best known images.

She taught photography as a process of perception, in the Bauhaus tradition, viewing light and the camera as tools in the act of learning to see. She wrote ‘Do not trim or crop this photograph’ on the back of her prints, so that there would be no attempt to “correct” or improve the way she had cropped them in the viewfinder. Her photograph, Robert Rauschenberg and Betty Jennerjahn (1952) is a good example of her close up, tightly framed work. I also like her contemplative photographs of the stone memorial on the campus, The Quiet House.

A testament to how well regarded she was at the time, her photographs were included in MoMA’s 1949 exhibition ‘Six Women Photographers: Margaret Bourke-White, Helen Levitt, Dorothea Lange, Tana Hoban, Esther Bubley, and Hazel Frieda Larsen’, which featured many of her portraits of biomorphic sculpture student Ruth Asawa.

Although most of her early negatives were destroyed in a fire, The Black Mountain College Museum manages her remaining archive. Her work can also be found in The Whitney Museum of American Art collection and the New York Public Library.

by Paula Vellet